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Article doesn't mention the original name "Heroku Garden". It was a playground for Ruby on Rails development. You could go from thought to deploy in matter of minutes.

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In 2008 I was a junior in high school learning RoR in my free time, and the teacher of my required Intro to Computers class let me essentially skip the class work if I could build a basic social media site in the semester.

The computers were always locked down tight but using Heroku Garden and its web editor for Rails apps I made it work. I've always been super appreciative of that exact functionality at that exact time, even as they grew into a more traditional hosting company.

[Author here] I did not know that! Thanks for sharing, will add it. I started using Heroku in 2012 for context, pre in-browser IDE form.

As a note. There was a popular Rails book at the time that was being released, I believe it was Michael Hartl's, but it may have been another one back then. The opening of the book was "open your web browser and go to herokugarden". On the day the book was released Heroku decided to pivot away from web based IDE towards the platform. Back then pivots weren't as common as they are now, believe Adam gave a talk at this at one of Eric Ries conferences.

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